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The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle
Guernica Editions, Spring 2022
90 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771837170
ISBN10: 1771837179
English
$19.95 Canada, $17.95 US, £11.95 UK
The Narrow Cabinet is a book about change, loss and the struggle to understand what the hell is going on in a world experiencing such rapid transformations. The movement is from (a) an old dispensation of tough minded, rugged living and surviving troubled times through (b) a narcissistic sinkhole of complacency leading ultimately to (c) a zombie apocalypse. That is the general trajectory, but the work itself complicates the tropes. The old dispensation is by no means a paradise, nor is it dealt with nostalgically. The seeds of all the trouble are there from the start. But there is something admirable in the strength and fearless grit we find during that phase. In the sinkhole phase, the voice flits between depressive angst and lunatic outrage as oppressive forces exert ever more stubborn pressure. Here the speaker begins seeking the cause of the trouble that worsens until ultimately manifesting as zombie culture.
"The hands that built the house I come from/ murdered two men and fled and fled again / over land and sea and ocean, from Old Europe / deep into the Laurentian Mountains."
In The Narrow Cabinet Asa Boxer expertly interweaves high satire and refined wit with base passions and brute force. This is a book which powerfully demonstrates Boxer's absolute and beauteous synthesis of all the elements of poetry while at the same time making important commentary on our times. Asa Boxer is one of the best poets writing in the English language. The Narrow Cabinet is essential reading.
Marc di Saverio, poet, author of Crito Di Volta
Like the Great Wallenda poised upon a tightrope above the gnashing, slavering jaws of Niagara Falls, Asa Boxer’s sharply crafted poems consistently draw the living into deep focus. His edge-of-chasm calmness and his way of softly imploding the human experiment – vicious yet tender – results in poetry that swallows its own barely contained mythologies. The weight of witness drenches Boxer’s writing – nostalgic, Shakespearian, zombie apocalyptic – with the wisdom of the walking dead. The poems in The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle will worm into your inward most searches and set up camp. Deliciously insidious.
Harry Posner, poet, author of Malware: A Novella Trilogy
Like his bravura tightrope walker in "The Great Wallenda," Boxer "minds each [word]," "indulges no illusions," and "throbs with the thrill" of his vistas. These poems continually delight the reader with their skill and daring.
Janice Fiamengo, retired Professor of English, University of Ottawa.
Books by Asa Boxer
